15 Best Photo Editing Software for Mac. With taking photos more and more popular in people's lives, photo editing has become a hot topic. There is countless photo editing software for Mac users.

What Kind of Photo Editing Software Do You Need?

The best free photo-editing software Here are 4 free alternatives to Photoshop for all your editing needs.
Free photo editing software, free download - Fotor Photo Editor, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, ACDSee Pro 3, and many more programs.

Whether you merely shoot with your smartphone or you're a professional photographer with a studio, you need software to organize and edit your photos. We all know that camera technology is improving at a tremendous rate. Today's smartphones are more powerful than the point-and-shoots of just a few years ago. The same can be said for photo editing software. 'Photoshopping' pictures is no longer the exclusive province of art directors and professional photographers. Whether you're shooting from an iPhone XS or a DSLR, if you really care how your photos look, you'll want to import them into your PC to organize them, pick the best ones, perfect them, and print or share them online. Here we present the best choices in photo editing software to suit every photographer, from the casual to the professional.

Of course, novice shooters will want different software from those shooting with a $50,000 Phase One IQ3 in a studio. We've included all levels of PC software here, however, and reading the linked reviews will make it clear which is for you. Nothing says that pros can't occasionally use an entry-level application or that a prosumer won't be running Photoshop, the most powerful image editor around. The issue is that, in general, users at each of these levels will be most comfortable with the products that are intended for them.

Note that in the table above, it's not a case of 'more checks mean the program is better.' Rather, it's designed to give you the quick overview of the products. A product with everything checked doesn't necessarily have the best implementation of those features, and one with fewer checks still may be very capable, and whether you even need the checked feature depends on your photo workflow. For example, DxO Photolab may not have face recognition or keyword tagging, but it has the finest noise reduction in the land and some of the best camera- and lens-based profile corrections.

Free Photo Editing Options

So you've graduated from smartphone photography tools like those offered by Instagram and Facebook. Does that mean you have to pay a ton for high-end software? Absolutely not. Up-to-date desktop operating systems include photo software at no extra cost. The Microsoft Photos app included with Windows 10 may surprise some users with its capabilities. In a touch-friendly interface, it offers a good level of image correction, autotagging, blemish removal, face recognition, and raw camera file support. It can even automatically create editable albums based on photos' dates and locations.

Apple Photos does those things too, though its automatic albums aren't as editable. Both programs also sync with online storage services: iCloud for Apple and OneDrive for Microsoft. With Apple Photos, you can search based on detected object types, like 'tree' or 'cat' in the application (Microsoft Photos now offers this feature, too). Apple Photos also can integrate with plugins like the excellent Perfectly Clear, appeasing power users who lament the company's discontinuation of the prosumer-level Aperture program.

Ubuntu Linux users are also covered when it comes to free, included photo software: They can use the capable-enough Shotwell app. And no discussion of free photo editing software would be complete without mentioning the venerable GIMP, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It offers a ton of photoshop-style plugins and editing capabilities, but very little in the way of creature comforts or usability. Other lightweight, low-cost options include Polarr and Pixlr.

How to Edit Your Photos Online

In this roundup, we've only included installable computer software, but entry-level photo shooters may be adequately served by online photo-editing options. These are mostly free, and they're often tied to online photo storage and sharing services. Flickr (with its integrated photo editor) and Google Photos are the biggest names here, and both can spiff up your uploaded pictures and do a lot to help you organize them. They even approach the two entry-level installed programs here, but they lack many tools found in the pro and enthusiast products. The latest version of Lightroom CC includes a good deal of photo-editing capabilties in its included website, too. Other notable names in web-based photo editing include BeFunky, Fotor, and PicMonkey.

Image Editing for Enthusiasts and Prosumers

Most of the products in this roundup fall into this category, which includes people who genuinely love working with digital photographs. These are not free applications, and they require a few hundred megabytes of your disk space. Several, such as Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector, are strong when it comes to workflow—importing, organizing, editing, and outputting the photos from a DSLR. Such apps offer nondestructive editing, meaning the original photo files aren't touched. Instead, a database of edits you apply is maintained, and they appear in photos that you export from the application. These apps also offer strong organization tools, including keyword tagging, color-coding, geo-tagging with maps, and in some cases face recognition to organize photos by what people appear in them.

At the back end of workflow is output. Capable software like Lightroom Classic offers powerful printing options such as soft-proofing, which shows you whether the printer you use can produce the colors in your photo or not. (Strangely, the new version of Lightroom CC—non-Classic—offers no printing capability at all.) Lightroom Classic can directly share photos to sites like Flickr and SmugMug. In fact, all really good software at this level offers strong printing and sharing, and some, like ACDSee and Lightroom, offer their own online photo hosting.

The programs at the enthusiast level and the professional level can import and edit raw files from your digital camera. These are files that include every bit of data from the camera's image sensor. Each camera manufacturer uses its own format and file extension for these. For example, Canon DSLRs use CR2 files and Nikon uses NEF. (Raw here simply means what it sounds like, a file with the raw sensor data; it's not an acronym or file extension, so there's no reason to capitalize it.)

Working with raw files provides some big advantages when it comes to correcting (often termed adjusting) photos. Since the photo you see on screen is just one interpretation of what's in the raw file, the software can dig into that data to recover more detail in a bright sky, or it can fully fix an improperly rendered white balance. If you set your camera to shoot with JPGs, you're losing those capabilities.

Enthusiasts want to do more than just import, organize and render their photos: They want to do fun stuff, too! Editors' Choice Adobe Photoshop Elements includes Guided Edits, which make special effects like motion blur or color splash (where only one color shows on an otherwise black-and-white photo) a simple step-by-step process.

Content-aware tools in some of these products let you do things like move objects around while maintaining a consistent background, or remove objects entirely—say you want to remove a couple of strangers from a serene beach scene—and have the app fill in the background. These edits don't involve simple filters like you get in Instagram. Rather, they produce highly customized, one-off images. Another good example is CyberLink PhotoDirector's Multiple Exposure effect, which lets you create an image with ten versions of Johnny jumping that curb on his skateboard, for example.

Most of these products can produce HDR effects and panoramas after you feed them multiple shots, and local edit brushes let you paint adjustments onto only specific areas of an image. Affinity Photo has those features, but its interface isn't intuitive, and it lacks management and lens profile corrections. Capture One, Paintshop Pro, and Lightroom have those and even more precise tools for local selections in recent versions. For example they let you select everything in a photo within a precise color range and refine the selection of difficult content such as a model's hair or trees on the horizon.

What Kind of Photo Editing Software Do You Need?

Free Photo Editing Options

How to Edit Your Photos Online

Image Editing for Enthusiasts and Prosumers

Professional Photo Editing Software

Picture Editor Software For Mac